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Kathleen Nez
Kathleen Hope Nez was born on May 5, 1957, to a Navajo Code Talker and his wife, a fellow Navajo. While Kathy would grow up far away from the reservation, her parents made sure she would still be connected to the culture, bring her to local Navajo meetings and speaking only Navajo at home. She always wondered why her parents left the reservation after the war and always longed to go there herself. Her parents would make sure she had her priorities straight when it came to fighting for what was right, bring her with them for the March on Washington, where she witnessed Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. She would graduate from high school in 1975 and started attending UC Berkeley thanks to a scholarship, once there she would quickly get involved with AIM and the Red Power movement. Getting involved in those groups would lead to Kathy writing some very radical things in down in a school magazine or two. She would graduate with a BA in Anthropology with Honors in May 1979. She would write her honors thesis on what the Fourth of July was to Native Americans, all the way from the founding to the then present. After getting her degree, she would return to the Navajo Reservation for the first time, working under a Navajo Anthropologist for the summer. She would start attending Yale to get her Masters in 1979 and would graduate in 1981. She would once again return to the reservation, this time working as an Anthropologist for the Nation. As the next ten years of her life would go by as both her professional and an activist career progressed. She would become a key member of her department, and active member of the Navajo community, and climbed the ranks of both AIM and the NCAI. She would start publishing books during this time as well, her first was in 1984. Throughout the 1980s, a democratization movement would take place in the Nation, arguing that the governmental structure should be changed from parliamentary to presidential. Kathleen would be a leader in this movement and ran for Council seat in 1986 against and incumbent. She would lose, by continued to be a leader in the movement, which ended up a success, getting the change the wanted in time for the 1990 election. Kathleen would run again and this time won herself a seat. She would serve on the council for two and a half terms with some success. Her four main focuses were preserving sacred sites, teaching Navajo to the youth, making sure girls had adequate supplies of feminine products, and repairing relations with other nearby tribes. She would become relatively popular within the Nation due to her work. In 2000 she announced that she would resign from the Council and run for a seat in the Arizona State Senate, which she would go on to win. In the Senate, her main focus was the better the life of Native Americans in Arizona mainly due to being the sole Native American in the State Senate during her first two years there and the fact that her district had a lot of Natives. Despite the Republican majority, thanks to a Democratic Governor during her last four years. As 2006 started, Kathleen announced she would run for the Navajo Presidency after ruling out a run for Congress. She would go on to the general election, the first female in Navajo history to do so, and faced the scandalous yet popular incumbent. The election would be close with Kathleen coming out on top with 51/49, and she would get reelected in 2010 with 55/45. Her administration started rather successfully, helped by the fact that she was able to work with both Arizona and the Federal Government better than any other previous President due to various connections she had in both places. Her time as President would also be marked with economic growth for the tribe, during her first term the tribes first two casino's were opened, and the green energy sector of the Nation's economy was massively expanded. During her second term, she would open two more casinos and managed to get a bill passed that legalized the sale of recreational marijuana on the reservation. With the increase in funds, she would expand both the Health Services and the Permanent Trust Fund. She was also known for embracing a nationalism of sorts, making sure that with every public meeting with an official of the United States or any other nation, besides Native ones, she would only speak Navajo. She wasn't without controversy of course, more traditional members of the tribe saw her as far too willing to work with the colonizers, largely citing the casinos, the bill she vetoed that would've created more Navajo language immersion programs starting in elementary school, and her administration directing the tribe to look into genetic manipulation as a way to heal Navajos with Severe Combined Immune Deficiency and/or Cancer caused by the uranium mining. Although she was looking into running for a third term, the Supreme Court ruled for a two-term max, which she would accept their decision and came to terms that her political career was now over. As her term was ending, ASU reached out to her office, looking to see if she would like a professorship, she would. She moved back to the house she owned in Phoneix and started teaching at ASU in the fall of 2015 as a Professor of American Indian Studies, although she would teach a few Political Science and Anthropology classes too. In 2016 she would be an ardent not-Sanders supporters, and once he decided to try and get Arizona in play, she would take part in several ads arguing for voters to vote for him. She would do the same in New Mexico with the addition of stumping for him later on in the year. Despite her support for not-Sanders, she would still vote for Clifford in the general given that she actually had a chance at winning Arizona, and therefore it was far too risky to vote Green. The records also show that she donated quite a large sum to the Libertarian campaign too, so there's that too. She was completely shocked that when the white supremacist was declared the winner. She almost instantly began wondering if she should reenter politics. She would look into running in either in 7th or the 9th. Detriming the 7th was a much better fit, she would join into the chorus of progressive voices telling the then-current Representative to run for the Senate. Eventually, he succumbed to the voices allowing Kathleen to announce her run to replace him. When she did, she listed four main reasons as to why she is running. The President is a white supremacist, to fight against the increasingly oligarchic nature of the US, to help make a country that is great to all its citizens not just the rich, white, men at the top, and to give the indigenous woman of America a voice in government for the first time in US history. She wasn't alone of course, this being the only open safe seat for Democrats in Arizona it was bound to attract some others. Some media outlets predicted a race between Kathleen and the Mayor of Phoneix, although the two reached a deal in private where he would run for the 9th district, which was also being vacated due to a Senate run. Ultimately Kathleen would be the frontrunner of the primary once it was clear who was running, partly because she had the most name recognization but also because she was the only one who has gotten things done in her political career. She would win primary with 47% of the vote with her closest opponent getting 35%. In the general election, she would face a Republican and a Libertarian. This being a district with a D+23 Cook PVI, she was widely expected to win, and she would win with the results coming in as 71/20/9. She's now in Washington, ready to start making history Category:Democrats